Margareta Hellmann successfully defended her Master thesis

Today, Margareta Hellmann successfully defended her Master thesis on the development of new mass spectrometric (and other) tools for the analysis of partially acetylated chitosans and partially methyl-esterified pectins as well as of hydrolytic enzymes degrading these biopolymers. She was supervised by our postdoctoral researcher Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr with whom she had initially discussed these different options for her project, which she ended up pursuing all in parallel. She determined the subsite specificities of human chitinolytic enzymes, and she optimized the quantitative mass spectrometric sequencing of pectin oligomers to characterize the subsite specificities of pectin degrading enzymes. She developed a method to determine the animal versus fungal origin of different chitosans, and she optimized a method to determine the dispersity in the fraction of acetylation in chitosan polymer samples. These are amazing achievements for a Master thesis! Almost without a break, she is now working on a research proposal for her doctoral project with us which – small wonder – will focus on perfecting and then also using these (and other) technical tools for solving a scientific and real-world problem. Or rather, knowing her, problems. We are not going to spoil it here. Watch for more to come!